The Good Women Of China

by Xinran

  ‘Xiao Ping must have been very strong.’

  ‘Yes. She used to howl over a scratch from a branch, and blanch at the sight of blood. But in those last fourteen days she was so strong, she even comforted me, saying, “Mama, I’m numb, so it doesn’t hurt a bit!” When her body was finally freed, I saw that her legs had been crushed to a pulp. The person who laid her out for the funeral said that her pelvis had broken under the pressure. I hope she really had lost feeling in her lower body in those fourteen days, when she was exposed to the elements. I counted every minute. Throughout that time people tried all sorts of different methods to rescue her, working round the clock, but nothing worked.

  ‘Finally, the soldiers helped me to climb the wall up to Xiao Ping, and piled up a makeshift seat for me so I could sit holding her in my arms for long periods at a time. Her small, weak body was icy cold, though it was summer.

  ‘For the first few days, Xiao Ping could still talk to me, and waved her hands about as she told stories. After the fourth day, she grew weaker and weaker, until she could barely lift her head. Although food and medicine were brought to her every day, and someone came to nurse her, the bottom half of her body must have been bleeding all the time, and gangrene must have been setting in. More and more people were concerned about her fate, but there was nothing anyone could do. The whole of Tangshan lay in ruins: there just weren’t enough emergency workers or equipment to go round, and the roads to the city were impassable. My poor daughter . . .’

  ‘Auntie Yang,’ I murmured. We were both crying.

  ‘In the last few days, I think Xiao Ping might have realised that there was no hope for her, though people made all sorts of excuses to keep her spirits up. She lay helplessly in my arms, unable to move. On the morning of the fourteenth day, she forced her torso upright and said to me, ‘‘Mama, I feel like the medicines you’ve been giving me are taking effect. There’s some strength in me, look!”

  ‘When they saw her sit up, the people around who had been watching her attentively for fourteen days all started clapping and cheering. I thought a miracle had happened too. When Xiao Ping saw how excited everyone was, she seemed to get a new surge of strength. Her face, which had been deadly pale, flushed bright red and she spoke to her well-wishers in a clear, loud voice, thanking them and answering questions. Somebody suggested that she sing a song, and the crowd clapped in approval. At first, Xiao Ping was shy, but people cheered her on: “Sing a song, Xiao Ping! Xiao Ping, sing a song!” At last, she nodded weakly, and started singing: “The red star is shining with a marvellous light, the red star is shining in my heart . . .”

  ‘Everyone knew this song back then, and many people started to sing along with Xiao Ping. The sound of singing amid the desolation was like the flowering of hope. For the first time in many days, people were smiling. After a few verses, Xiao Ping’s voice faltered, and she slowly sank back into my arms.’

  Mrs Yang fell silent for a long time. Finally, she roused herself and continued. ‘Xiao Ping never woke again. I thought she was sleeping, but when I realised my mistake, it was too late. She had no last words; her last experience of this world was of people singing and smiling around her. When the doctor told me that she was dead, I was calm – those fourteen days and two hours had wrung me dry. It was only four days later, when they finally dug out Xiao Ping’s body, which had started to smell, that I began to weep. Her body was in such a state . . . my own flesh and blood . . . I hurt, how I hurt!’

  I sobbed with her, ‘I’m sorry, Auntie Yang, I’m sorry.’

  ‘Poor child, in her fourteen years she only saw three films, Tunnel Warfare, Mine Warfare and The Battle of North and South, and eight model operas. She never laid eyes on a pretty dress or a pair of high-heel shoes . . .’

  ‘That is a great sadness in Chinese history. I came out of those times too, and had virtually no experience of youth or beauty.’

  Mrs Yang sighed. ‘Some people say the earthquake was divine retribution for the events of the Cultural Revolution. But who were the gods taking revenge on? I have never done anything to offend them or anything immoral. Why did they destroy my daughter?’

  ‘Oh, Auntie Yang, don’t say that! Xiao Ping’s death wasn’t retribution. Don’t think that, whatever you do. If, in the place where she is now, Xiao Ping knew you were in so much pain, it would make her worry. You ought to live as best and as happily as you can – that’s the best reward for Xiao Ping’s sacrifice, don’t you agree?’

  ‘Yes, that’s true . . . but I . . . oh well, let’s not talk about that. You’re busy, go and get on with your things, don’t pay any attention to my silly talk.’

  ‘Thank you, Auntie Yang.’ I pressed her hand. ‘I think you see a lot of happiness and laughter in the children here. I’m sure that as they grow up the children will be a continuation of Xiao Ping’s soul, and the wonderful things she left to the world.’ I looked up at Xiao Ping’s photograph and felt as if she was imploring me not to leave her mother alone. It was as if she was speaking to me with my son PanPan’s voice.

  Several days later, I returned to Tangshan to interview the head of the orphanage, Warden Ding.

  Warden Ding had been an administrative officer in the army for more than ten years. Her husband had left the army due to ill health, and she had moved with her family from south-west China back to Tangshan about a year before the earthquake. She had lost her daughter in the disaster, and her son had lost both his legs. Later, her husband had died from a heart attack. She had brought up her crippled son with the help of the government. He had taught himself accountancy, and had volunteered to help with the accounts when several mothers were discussing setting up the orphanage. Not long after my visit, he died of an infection in his wounds.

  To avoid bringing back painful memories for Warden Ding, I tried to interview her son instead. However, he said that he had been too young at the time, and could not remember the earthquake. He told me his mother had never told him the true reason for his sister’s death. He had only heard vaguely that she had not died in the earthquake, but had killed herself afterwards. He wanted very much to ask his mother about this, but every time he broached the subject, his mother would shush him.

  There was nothing for it but to ask Warden Ding if she was willing to be interviewed. She agreed, but suggested that I wait until the National Day holiday to come back and interview her. When I asked why, she said, ‘It won’t take me long to tell you my story, but it will throw me off balance for several days after. I will need time to recover.’ National Day that year fell before a weekend, so we had three days off in a row. This was a long holiday for China, where holidays were not routine.

  The evening before the holiday, when I had just arrived in Tangshan, Warden Ding telephoned to invite me to meet her.

  I went over to the orphanage, and sought to reassure her by saying that we could stop the interview at any time if she found it too difficult.

  She smiled faintly. ‘Xinran, thank you for the kind thought, but don’t forget I am a soldier who has seen action in Korea.’

  I nodded. ‘I heard that you didn’t lose a single member of your family in the earthquake?’

  ‘That’s right, but survival was disaster for all of us.’

  ‘Am I right in thinking that your husband died of grief at your daughter’s misfortune?’

  ‘Yes, and I almost died too. It was the thought of my crippled son that held me back. I thought of myself as a necessary part of him, only then could I live on.’

  In a faltering voice, I prompted, ‘Your daughter committed suicide because . . .’

  ‘To this day, only three people know why: my husband, my daughter and myself.’

  ‘Oh?’

  ‘Yes. You must have heard many times about how much destruction the earthquake caused – I don’t need to go over it again. In fact, words cannot fully describe that scene. You only know what it feels like to be at the end of the world if you experience it yourself. In a situation like that, you thin
k of your family first.

  ‘The aftershocks had not yet died away when my husband and I managed to leave the building we had lived in, which was on the point of collapse. We discovered that the room where our children slept had been torn apart, but they were nowhere to be seen. My heart contracted with fear. Because there was a military airport near us, we were quickly rescued by the garrison. They soon dug my son out, but his legs had already been crushed, so they were amputated above the knee, as you see today. It’s lucky he was rescued in good time, otherwise, on such a hot day, his wounds would have turned gangrenous and put his life in danger. After two days had passed and my daughter had still not been found, I was close to losing my mind. I saw injured, maimed and dead people dug out and carried away every day; almost never a whole person with nothing missing and no injuries.

  ‘When I had almost given up hope, someone told me that many injured people had been taken to the airport runways. As long as there was a thread of hope, I had to go and have a look.

  ‘But when I made it to the airport I was speechless with shock: the long runways were packed solid with groaning bodies, laid out in four or five rows. Only then did it really sink in that the earthquake had not just shaken our building, it had destroyed an entire city of hundreds of thousands of people. Filled with dread, I started to try to identify my daughter from among the rows of dead and injured people; they must all have been alive when they arrived, but some had died before there was time to administer first aid. It was difficult to identify anyone: hardly any of them were wearing clothes; some of the women’s faces were covered by their hair; some people were covered in mud. After half a day, I had gone over less than half a runway. When dusk fell, I went to the tents the garrison had provided for us. I planned to continue my search the next morning.

  ‘Many people were sleeping in the tent I was in. There was no distinction between the sexes, and no distinction between rich and poor either. People collapsed in any empty space they could find, exhausted from rushing about desperately, searching without eating or drinking, living on hope.

  ‘Just as I was nodding off, the voices of two men drifted over from close by:

  ‘“What are you up to? Still not sleeping?”

  ‘“I’m thinking about that girl . . .”

  ‘“Still?”

  ‘“I’m not thinking about that. I was just wondering if she mightn’t die after being dumped in that place.”

  ‘“Damn, I hadn’t thought of that!”

  ‘“What we did was bad enough, what if she dies?”

  ‘“What do you mean by that? Do you want to go and check? If so, we’d better go quick. Then there’ll still be a space for us when we get back, otherwise we’ll get soaked by the rain if we sleep outside.”

  ‘I looked around to see who was talking, and was shocked to see a length of multicoloured string trailing from one of the men’s shorts. It looked like the string my daughter used to tie her hair back. I didn’t want to believe that it was my daughter they were talking about, but what if it was? I rushed over to the men and asked where the multicoloured string had come from. They wouldn’t give me a proper answer, which made me even more suspicious. I shouted at them ferociously, asking them where the girl they had been talking about was; frightened, they mumbled something about a ditch by a distant runway, and then they fled. I could not ask them for any more details, let alone catch them; all I wanted was to know if the girl was my daughter.

  ‘I ran off in the direction the men had indicated. When I had reached the edge of a ditch, I heard faint groans, but could not see who it was in the dark. Just then, two soldiers on patrol came over to me; they had electric torches and were guarding the injured people on the runways. I asked them to shine their torches into the ditch. In the weak torchlight, we saw a naked girl. At that moment my feelings were thoroughly confused; I both hoped she was and was not my daughter. When the two soldiers helped me carry her on to the runway, I realised that she was indeed my daughter.

  ‘“Xiao Ying, Xiao Ying!” I shouted her name, but she looked at me in confusion, without the slightest reaction.

  ‘“Xiao Ying, it’s Mama!” Suddenly, I noticed that the lower part of her body was sticky and wet, but there was no time to think any more of it as I hurriedly dressed her in clothes the soldiers lent us. Strangely, Xiao Ying pulled the trousers down again.

  ‘When I asked her why she had done that, she just closed her eyes and hummed. She was so tired, she soon fell asleep. I lay dazed for a long time before I too, fell asleep.

  ‘At daybreak, the roaring of a plane woke me. When I saw Xiao Ying lying next to me, I was dumbstruck: she was pulling down her trousers with an idiot grin on her face, and her legs and groin were all bloody. Just then, I remembered the words of those two men. Had they taken advantage of the disaster to rape Xiao Ying? I dared not believe it. And my daughter, a radiant, vivacious girl, had lost her mind.

  ‘The doctor said that Xiao Ying had had too great a shock, and told my husband and me that Xiao Ying had definitely been gang-raped. That was all I heard before I blacked out. When I came to, my husband was holding my hand, his face wet with tears. We looked at each other speechlessly and wept: our daughter had been brutalised and gone mad, our son’s legs were gone . . .’

  Warden Ding fell silent.

  ‘May I ask if you sent Xiao Ying for treatment?’ I asked quietly.

  ‘We did, but we didn’t understand that she would still feel the terror even if she recovered. Two and a half years later, just as her memory was starting to get back to normal, the day before we were planning to take her home to start a new life, she hanged herself in her hospital room.

  In the letter she left for us she said:

  Dear Mama and Papa,

  I’m sorry, I can’t go on living. You shouldn’t have saved me. There is nothing in the memories that are coming back but everything falling apart, and the cruelty and violence of those men. That is all that is left for me in this world, and I can’t live with those memories every day. Remembering is too painful, I’m leaving.

  Your daughter, Xiao Ying.

  ‘How old was Xiao Ying then?’ I asked.

  ‘She was sixteen, her brother was eleven.’ Warden Ding paused. ‘My husband tore his hair out with grief, saying that he was the one who had hurt the child, but of course it wasn’t his fault. That night, he did not come to bed until very late. I was exhausted, and went to sleep, but when I woke up, his body was cold, and his face was frozen in sadness. The death certificate issued by the doctor states that he died of a heart attack from extreme exhaustion.’

  I found it hard to breathe. ‘Warden Ding, it’s very hard to imagine how you could bear this.’

  She nodded resignedly.

  ‘And you didn’t want your son to know?’

  ‘He had already borne damage to his body; how could he bear the same damage to his mind and his emotions?’

  ‘But you bravely carried on.’

  ‘I made it, but I wasn’t really brave. I am one of those who are strong in front of other people, a so-called tower of strength among women, but when I’m alone I cry all night: for my daughter, my husband, my son, and for myself. Sometimes, I can’t breathe for missing them. Some people say that time heals everything, but it hasn’t healed me.’

  On the train home, I cried all the way. I cried again when I took up my pen to write down the experiences of these mothers. I find it very difficult to imagine their courage. They are still living. Time has carried them to the present, but in every minute, every second that has passed, they have been struggling with scenes left to them by death; and every day and every night they bear the painful memories of losing their children. This is not pain which can be removed by the will of an individual human being: the smallest domestic object – a needle and thread, a chopstick and bowl – can carry them back to the smiling faces and voices of dead souls. But they have to stay alive; they must walk out of their memories and return to reality. Only now do I realise why t
here was a picture of an eye in every room of the orphanage – that big eye, brimming over with tears, that eye with ‘the future’ written on the pupil. They did not lock their mother’s kindness away in their memories of their children; they did not immerse themselves in tears of suffering and wait for pity. With the greatness of mothers, they made new families for children who had lost their parents. To me those women proved the unimaginable strength of Chinese women. As a mother, I can imagine the loss they must have felt, but I do not know if I would have been able to give so freely in the midst of pain like theirs.

  When I presented a programme based on these interviews, I received more than seven hundred letters in five days. Some people asked me to send their respects to the mothers at the orphanage, and to thank them. Some people sent money, asking me to buy presents for the children. They shared the emotions the programme had roused in them: one woman said she felt grateful for her children; a girl said that she wanted to hug her mother for the first time; a boy who had left home several months before said that he had decided to return to his parents and beg their forgiveness. Every desk in the office was covered with these letters, and a big cardboard box by the door was filled with presents for the children and mothers. In it were things from Old Chen, Big Li, Mengxing, Xiao Yao, Old Zhang . . . and many other colleagues.

  6

  What Chinese Women Believe

  I hadn’t forgotten the university student Jin Shuai’s three questions: What philosophy do women have? What is happiness for a woman? And what makes a good woman? In the course of the research for my programmes, I tried to answer them.

  I thought it would be interesting to ask my older and more experienced colleagues Big Li and Old Chen their opinions about the philosophies that guide women’s lives. Obviously, at a time when a belief in the Party always came first, I had to be careful how I phrased this question. ‘Of course, women believe in the Party above everything else,’ I began, ‘but do they have any other beliefs?’